Pray Harder!

Central, Wales

1 John 5:14-15 from the New American Standard Bible

And this is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, He hears us.

And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked before Him.

Henry Clarence Thiessen writes that asking things according to God’s will is an aspect of abiding and having confidence in God. Thiessen (1956: 399). It suggests that the person praying has a correct condition of the heart. Thiessen (1956: 399). In his article, Theology of Prayer, Alan Richardson explains that from Jesus’ perspective, all of our prayers are answered, but not necessarily in the way we would have chosen. Richardson (1999: 458). D.G. Bloesch notes that God wants his followers to be in partnership with him, but prayer is fundamentally about sharing personal needs with God and being conformed to his divine will and purposes. Bloesch (1996: 867).

I reason that theology from 1 John 5:14-15, should conclude that Christians should ask God that they will pray and make requests along the lines of God’s will. Prayer should be primarily made for personal fellowship with God, and secondarily for personal requests. Even if an individual Christian is primarily being guided by the Holy Spirit in life, there is no guarantee that each and every heard prayer request will be answered according to the will of the human follower, but will be answered according to God’s will and purposes.

On Sunday, I had a discussion with a well-meaning young woman at church. She is one of these people that is always trying to be positive. She was telling me how she had been very down in an earlier part of her life and she prayed and God significantly lifted her spirits. She strongly believes that the Lord assisted her, and I am not trying to intellectually challenge this claim. My disagreement with her is when she tries to make her experience, theology for every case. She stated that in regard to me being single, I should not discuss or list legitimate reasons why I am single, but simply pray about it. I informed her that I have prayed about it for more than 20 years, and that God is sovereign and does not have to answer my prayers the way I want them to be answered. She then stated, pray harder! I am not using ad hominem here and attacking her personally with a name, but this really struck me as ding-dong theology. I am basically stating that it is foolish theology. God seemingly answered her prayer and gave her significant blessings when dealing with problems, but many believers throughout the ages, and today, have many problems and her theology is presumptuous to assume that persons simply need to pray harder to overcome difficulties. In regard to theodicy and the problem of evil, this type of theology is an example of the difficulty of placing too much emphasis on human free will, instead of God’s sovereignty, as if in every case, persons are suffering because they are doing something wrong, and not praying hard enough. 1 John 5:14-15 does not state that if we pray hard enough all of our prayers will be answered to our satisfaction, it states that our prayers will be heard when made within God’s will. Requests, as Richardson states, will be answered, but not necessarily according to what we as Christians desire. It must be remembered in regard to theodicy and the problem of evil, that God meets the needs of Christians in order to fulfill his purposes, and not necessarily in order to provide maximal human fulfillment in this present earthly realm.

BLOESCH, D.G. (1996) ‘Prayer’ in Walter A. Elwell (ed.) Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Grand Rapids, Baker Books.

RICHARDSON, ALAN (1999) ‘Prayer, Theology of’ in Alan Richardson and John Bowden (eds.), A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, London, SCM Press Ltd.

THIESSEN, HENRY C. (1956) Introductory Lectures in Systematic Theology, Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.


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